Tool: Zotero

Install Zotero.
Install the Zotero plug-in on your browser. Tip: Chrome seems to have a better plug-in than Safari.

As you find papers, the Zotero plug-in will allow you to quickly add the citation into your Zotero library. You can then add notes within Zotero and use “generate report” to created your annotated bibliography.

Annotated Biblography 1

A necessary component of any research project is surveying the existing literature related to your topic to get a sense of what is already known. This will help you to further develop your topic, motivate your research, and demonstrate how the results will contribute to the larger body of knowledge.

Conducting a literature review can at times feel overwhelming. There is often an immense literature from a variety of sources that you need to read critically and then assemble into a coherent picture of the whole. An annotated bibliography is a useful organizational tool that will help you to do this.

The annotated bibliography should include the full citations for references related to your research that are likely to appear in your thesis. The citations should follow the Author - Year format.

The annotated bibliography should contain notes and comments that will help you to incorporate the cited work into your paper. Sources that are only tangentially related may have very brief notes. Such sources may provide only a motivating opinion or statistics, or they may be part of an empirical literature that you will mention in passing because it is not closely tied to your own topic. Other sources that are more closely related will merit longer and more detailed notes. For instance, if you are citing an empirical paper addressing a similar question to your own, you should make notes about the research design and main results.

Which studies/papers/books to include?

Broadly speaking, a study that is relevant for your thesis fits into one or more of the following groups:

As you put together your annotated bibliography, think about which group your study falls into. You can add a tag to each study using the groups above. A guide on tagging sources in Zotero can be found here

How do you get started?

AI tools: I recommend starting with Elicit. It generates both papers on your topic and includes a summary of the findings. Do not panic or drop your topic after doing a search! If you find multiple papers that have address your specific question, instead of feeling despair, you should be delight in knowing that great minds think alike! Keep your topic/question and chat with me. I have have mixed success with ChatGPT - but feel free to use it as well.

Google Scholar: Typically the studies with the highest citations will appear at the top of the list. Focus on papers geared towards economists. Papers published in economics journals (“economics” is in the title of the journal) or NBER/IZA working papers are good clues. You should also customize the time range to see if there are any recent papers on the topic (i.e. since 2017). Do not panic if you see a study that is similar to your proposal. There are enough permutations available to make your study a contribution. A common used permutation is to change the outcome of interest. Please discuss with me if you need additional ideas.

Wikipedia: I typically will use it to get a broad idea of the topic and also to see who is referenced.

Once you find a set of studies: Keep track of people who show up a lot in the readings. Go to their websites to see what work they have done.

Just read the introductions to the papers. An well written econ paper does the following: a) summarize the main findings, b) discuss the research design, and c) convince the reader why the study is an important contribution.

For each paper, in your own words, write a brief paragraph summarizing the main findings of the paper and why the paper may be important for your thesis. It may seem redundant to summarize the findings of the paper given that the paper already does so - but putting the paper’s findings in your own words will help you remember the paper.

Output required

Using the report feature on Zotero, generate a report and save it as a .pdf. Submit it via Slack by the deadline. There is an expectation of at least 20 papers (but you can have more).

  1. This section is a excerpted (with slight modifications) from Professor C. Myer’s handout “Annotated Bibliographies”.↩︎